This Creationist’s Awful Short Film Claims Scientists Believe in Surfing Monkeys

Matt Powell, the hate-preacher and Creationist who appears to have dedicated his life to making atheists look smart, has done it again.

About a month ago, Powell made a video purporting to explain what scientists believe. It included this line: “In order for evolution to be true, monkeys would have had to surf from Africa to South America 34 million years ago on rafts.”

He was basing that on a superficial reading of a 2015 blog post on the website for National Geographic, which sought to explain a paper published in Nature.

Here’s the gist of that paper: Before it was published, the oldest fossils we had of New World monkeys were found in Bolivia and dated to about 26 million years ago. But new fossils had been discovered in Peru which were approximately 10 million years older and more closely resembled primates in Africa. So how did those creatures get to South America? A rafting event — where creatures traveled across the ocean via floating vegetation — is one possibility.

That’s the what the NatGeo article said, too. The word surfing didn’t appear in the paper or the article, only the attention-grabbing headline on the website.

And yet Powell, who is incapable of reading beyond a headline, ran with it and claimed monkeys surfed their way onto a new continent. As in: They actively decided to come to South America and then figured out a way to get there… and that seems absurd… therefore evolution is a hoax.

That’s why his video made no sense.

And like so many unintelligent people, he will never admit his mistake. Instead, he’s doubling down on his exaggerated claim with a short scripted film in which he runs into an atheist who challenges his Christian views. Powell brings up monkeys surfing. The atheist doesn’t buy it.

Powell’s response? Just Google it! (Really. That’s his answer.)

The atheist finds the NatGeo article and others like it. And that, apparently, proves Powell is right.

I didn’t realize it was possible to make a film that’s even more heavy-handed than God’s Not Dead, but Powell managed to do it in three minutes.

This isn’t Powell’s first flop. He has previously said the government should execute gay people because the Bible says so, and that women should stop dressing like whores, and that “99% of school shootings are done by atheists,” and that it’s a “historical fact” that dinosaurs were killed in the Civil War, and that all atheists are “Coke-drinking video game addicts.”

But never before has his tripe been scripted in advance like this.